Word: gnostics
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Elaine Pagels. Her much honored 1979 work, The Gnostic Gospels, was one of the rare volumes of religious scholarship to find a general readership. In her new book, The Origin of Satan (Random House; $23), Pagels, a professor of religion at Princeton University, examines how the earliest Christians made their opponents out to be the devil. First the Jews who spurned Christ, then the Romans who persecuted his followers, then other Christians who departed from the orthodoxies of the newly consolidating church -- each group in turn, she says, appears in early Christian texts not just as a philosophical contender...
...what is the fifth gospel? It is the Gospel of Thomas, which church fathers deemed unacceptable because it contained ideas of the heretical Gnostic sects. Indeed, the book ends with Jesus rebuking Peter for trying to oust a woman named Mary from the company of disciples. "Females are not worthy of life," says Peter. Jesus replies, "Look, I shall guide her to make her a male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every female who makes herself male will enter heaven's kingdom." Three sentences in Thomas survive the seminar's judgment...
...glimpses of this person in the book who, despite all the self-actualization, writes as if she believes that what Julie Andrews or Mahatma Gandhi or the Gnostic Gospels have to tell us is more worthwhile than what makes her tick. Fortunately, one of the world's most interesting women is incapable of writing an uninteresting book, even when she summarizes most of the extant literature on the inner child. A $700,000 advance can buy a lot of self-esteem. But if that's not enough, if only the women whose lives were touched by Steinem were...